


Duties Paid for Monster Hunting

by EdgarAllenPoet



Series: Whumptober 2019 [3]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Delirium, Gen, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Psychosis, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-03
Updated: 2019-10-03
Packaged: 2020-11-23 01:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20883917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EdgarAllenPoet/pseuds/EdgarAllenPoet
Summary: “There’s a difference between dementia and delirium.”Four time Barclay’s dealt with delirium and bounced back, and one time it was a little more permanent. Stories from the pine guard then, now, and later.





	Duties Paid for Monster Hunting

**Author's Note:**

> prompt #3 for whumptober2019: delirium 
> 
> cha boy can’t write a drabble to save their life, i s2g. I’m having a hell of a brain day (ironically, considering), so if this might be absolutely disjointed and incoherent, but it might be good? We’ll see on the re-read later.

The psychic monster that caused delirium and seizing in its victims had been a bitch and a half to take care of. It had been a long,  _ long _ week, and the previously vacant psychiatric ward at the hospital had a long,  _ long _ week trying to figure out what could have possibly caused nine random Kepler citizens to have near identical psychotic breaks at the same damn time, and then miraculously, return to perfect health-- or at least the health they’d had before the event. 

Barclay wishes he could remember it with any sort of clarity. Wishes he could say he wasn’t one of the first ones taken out. Wishes he’d been there to fight, instead of waking up tied to a cot in the Pine Guard headquarters-- read: drafty, chilly basement-- fighting off a killer hangover that came from being drugged unconscious for the last few days. He’d woken up, groaned, and thrown up over the edge of his bed right onto the floor. Thacker had come to retrieve him-- untie him, apologize-- and he’d hesitated in the doorway before letting himself in, cautious,  _ scared _ . It made Barclay sick. 

The memories he had from that week were broken and foggy, overlapping each other and unable to be put in any semblance of order, but what he did remember wasn’t good. He was too dangerous to ever lose control like that, too hard to subdue and hold down. Half the battle of fighting the abomination had been fighting him first, and Barclay, despite having zero control over the situation, felt burning shame any time he thought about it.

It reminded him of the early days, before he’d picked up his sliver of the Crystal, before he’d found the Hot Springs, before he’d had anything sustaining himself, and the delirium that accompanied the hunger of starving to death. The way he’d get before he broke down and stumbled back in through the gate, trying to sneak back in, trying to keep himself going. 

Mark-- their local college Pine Guard member, twenty years old and made of pure spitfire-- had gone down shortly after him, but seeing as he didn’t have the strength of a Big Foot, he’d been restrained much more kindly to the basement sofa. He’d stayed with them for a week after they’d woken up again, skipping all of his lectures and scaring his roommates shitless, though they’d gotten accustomed to his random disappearances by this point.

It had been a hell of a situation, and no one had been happy about it. They didn’t talk about it much, but Mama hadn’t been as subtle as she thought she was about guiding Barclay into her room for bed and waiting until she thought he was asleep before pulling him close and holding him in a grip that made it hard to breathe.

  
  
  


\---

Dealing with your own mental fuckery and  _ witnessing  _ someone else’s were very different experiences. He was lucky, at least, that Aubrey seemed to be having an easy go of it.

She was in and out of it every few hours or so. She hadn’t stirred when he’d come in, but she nearly woke when Mama stepped out-- taking an uncharacteristically tender moment to push Aubrey’s hair off of her forehead as she went. She barely roused when the nurses came to check vitals, chatting quietly with Barclay about her status and improvement.  _ Moderate TBI _ , they told him.  _ And a few burns, but none of her neurological symptoms were frightening. She’d be fine. _

He kept that in mind for the moments Aubrey woke up, absolutely incoherent and incomprehensible. She’d be fine.

Barclay wasn’t as familiar with the hospital as he could have been, given they’d taken up at-home first aid within the first few years of the Pine Guard. If they could do their own stitches and disinfecting, assess their own concussions and breaks, and wrap their own sprains, they could cut their number of hospital visits in half. For a while they’d had an EMT on team, and she’d been even more useful for setting bones and stopping bleeding and telling them to call it quits and get their asses to the hospital, but she’d vanished a few years before Thacker had, just packed up and left in the middle of the night. 

They really did their best to avoid the hospital.

But Aubrey was young, and new, and Mama had taken a liking to her rather quickly. She was true to her name that way, always taking extra care of the younger ones. So when Aubrey had hit the wall and collapsed, Mama hadn’t even entertained Barclay’s argument that they could take her home and keep an eye on her, she’d be fine. No, she had loaded Aubrey into the truck and said Barclay could either climb in, ride with Ned, or  _ walk _ . 

He’d gone with Ned and Duck, gotten a ride back to the Lodge to check in on everyone there knowing Mama was more than capable of handling herself. Hospitals made him nervous-- too many questions, too many people who knew a hell of a lot about humans, who could probably induce that Barclay  _ wasn’t one _ given enough time and observation. But Mama asked him to step in, keep an eye, so of course he’d gone. He caught the tail end of Aubrey’s delirium and tried not to fret about Mama’s lack of explanation regarding her “errands.”

“Don’t you worry about me, it ain’t anything to fret over,” she’d said, and she’d squeezed his hand in hers and kissed the side of his head before leaving, so now of  _ course _ he was fretting. Everything was something to worry about, as far as Mama was concerned, and the affection meant she’d be gone a while.

He had things to keep him busy at least. The Lodge, and Aubrey, and planning for the next abomination. He loaded Aubrey into the truck, reminding her gently to mind her head as she climbed in. She was woozy, a bit unsteady, but they’d released her to go home. She dozed against the passenger window on the drive, and Barclay was glad it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Give it time, though, he figured, and things would get a hell of a lot worse.

There he goes, fretting again.

  
  


\---

Taking into consideration his tendency to be rather anxious about everything most of the time, Barclay could understand why Mama didn’t tell him about Thacker right away. He’d wished she’d told him  _ sooner _ , because God  _ damn, _ Mama, they’d been friends. They’d been friends, they’d fought together for years, they’d been two-thirds of the original Pine Guard, and Barclay only found out he was back because of Duck, and Ned, and Aubrey. 

It just felt a little unfair, which he recognized was a rather petulant way to feel. So he was trying not to take it personally, and he was picking up the responsibility on top of that.

Mama was hurt, and well, yeah. Thacker knew a thing or two about fighting from back in the day, it figures that under the thrall of the Quell he’d be a handful and a half to wrangle back from the Wilds. So Barclay made her take it easy-- wording orders into  _ suggestions _ that made her think it was her idea in the first place, that was the most effective way of doing things, though sometimes he wished she would just  _ listen to him _ \-- and kept an eye on Thacker. He tried to get as much as he could out of him. He didn’t manage much of anything. 

Thacker didn’t talk, but he bit and scratched like an animal. Sometimes Barclay would say something that would draw his attention, get him to calm enough to actually  _ look _ at him, but Barclay had learned to stop getting his hopes up about that. If Thacker was coming back, it wasn’t from Barclay’s talking. He wasn’t a therapist, and with this amount of magic corruption, it probably wouldn’t matter if he was. 

It was hard to see though. Thacker had been kind and gentle, and yeah he’d threatened to shoot Barclay that one time, but that kind of thing happens between friends. Now he was stalking around, tearing up anything he could get his hands on, screeching, howling. He ate the foot Barclay put in front of him, though, and he didn’t try and attack sometimes when Barclay moved slowed enough. 

It wasn’t much. It made him nervous. Either Thacker was going to hurt himself, or he was going to make enough of a ruckus to catch Stern’s attention, or… or he wasn’t even going to come back. 

Maybe this was just it. Maybe this was Thacker now. Maybe he was broken, gone, and this was the new “normal” they all had to deal with. 

Barclay watched Thacker hiss and scream and flail and wondered guiltily if it would have been better for him not to come back. If he’d simply disappeared in the night the way they thought he had, the way so many others had before him. If he’d walked out on them, but was still out there living and breathing and  _ functioning _ .

If it would have been better for him to leave and keep his mind, than to come back and have no hope of finding it again.

  
  


\---

  
  


Dani looked a hell of a lot like Thacker.

It was the icing on the cake that was the horrible day. Everything went to hell in thirty minutes worse than it ever had in the thirty years of the Pine Guard, and then everything got much, much worse in the thirty seconds following.

Barclay didn’t stick around to see the aftermath. Before the shot even rang out, when Dani had first appeared, Barclay was already running. He didn’t see Ned running as well. He barely saw Ned hit the ground. He heard the shot ring out, he got Dani into his arms, and he ran. 

He’d always been good at running. 

All he could think about was saving her, was all the people watching, all the people who were scared. He thought of everyone there with guns-- of  _ Pigeon _ \-- of how this must have looked, but…

But seeing her feral and delirious he mostly thought about Thacker, about how he’d been in their basement for  _ months _ and he still hadn’t come back to himself. About how he was probably gone. About how they might have just lost Dani. 

About how they couldn’t get her back if she was dead. 

Maybe it was stupid, running back to the Lodge, potentially leading everyone right to it, but it wasn’t like everyone didn’t know already by now-- thanks a ot, Ned. Besides, he had to get somewhere that could help. He had to get her to the hot springs if he had any hope of getting her back to coherency. He moved as quickly as he could, having to stop every so often when she got a limb free, lashed out with her claws, with teeth, with kicks and screams. He felt bad as he all but dragged her away, held her strong enough to bruise until he was finally able to wrestle her into the clearing and dunk them both into the hot springs. 

He climbed in, dragging her in with him, and that was when she finally went still and stopped fighting him. 

She was practically unconscious at first, sagging bonelessly, and he had to keep his arms around her to keep her from falling face first into the water. It was cold outside, snow falling lightly around them, and the water felt almost too hot in comparison. They were both still fully dressed. The cuts from where she got a good swing on him were stinging. 

He ignored all of that discomfort and pushed every panicked thought about what’s happened and what it means to the back of his mind. He had more immediate worries right now, and he let himself focus on that. Let himself talk to Dani, try and get her to match his breathing pattern, try and make sure she was  _ still breathing _ at all. But slowly, when the sun started lighting the sky up again through the gaps of the trees, she started to stir. 

“Barclay?” 

He squeezed her tighter on impulse, heard a quiet groan of discomfort, and let her go. “Yeah, it’s me. I’ve got you.” 

“Are we… in the hot springs?” 

She pulled away, and he let her go, watched her squint around and get her bearings. She looked like hell-- filthy, unkempt, face sallow even though they’d been there for  _ hours _ , sweat darkening the hair at her temples, a flush to her face that might have been a fever. 

“Well we aren’t in a bathtub, I can tell ya that much.” 

She didn’t quite manage to laugh, but her lip did quirk up in half of a grin. 

“What happened?” she asked. A few long moments passed, and he couldn’t find the words to answer her. She sighed and said, “Something bad, huh?” 

He nodded. “Yeah, I’d say things broke real bad today.” 

She nodded back and sagged against him again, curling against his chest, and Barclay couldn’t help but remember her younger. She’d been just a kid when she’d come through the gate, and she hadn’t had the absolute mistrust of humans that a lot of Sylvans had when they first came over. She’d been quick to trust Mama, and also Barclay, but it had taken a while to wrap her head around the exile and the idea that she could never go home. 

That shit shouldn’t happen to children. 

They stayed there not talking for a while longer, wrapped up in the energy of Sylvain and each other. Trusting she could keep herself upright and away from drowning, he let his head lull back against the rocks and his eyes close as he dozed. It had been a long night. 

He opened his eyes again when footsteps caught his attention, and there was Jake, crouching next to him and doing the world’s worst job of faking calm. “We have to go,” he said, shaking Barclay’s shoulder. “Leo said something about having a space for us, and that’s your call and whatever, but Mama said we have to get outta here.” 

He nodded, sat up, and nudged Dani back awake. She still looked rough. The shadows under her eyes weren’t any brighter. 

“Where is she?” he asked, and Barclay could see him barely hold back a cringe. He straightened up a bit, started to climb up out of the water. “Jake….”

“They’re holding her down at the station. We were helping people out, with the land slide and all that, but… The FBI took her in.” 

And yeah, this truly was the nightmare scenario. At least Dani was back with them. Speaking of. 

“We gotta go. How are you feeling?” 

Dani hauled herself out a bit, struggled to get out of the hot spring. She shivered violently the second the cold air hit her, and Jake reflexively started peeling off his jacket. 

“I don’t think I can walk,” she said, sounding embarrassed, and it was easy work to get an arm under her legs and haul her up. 

“I got you,” he said, same as he had hours ago. Jake ran ahead of them inside, and Dani wrapped her arms around his neck and clung to him. This was bad. Everything had gone to shit. But at least Dani didn’t look a thing like Thacker.

  
  


\--- 

  
  


There’s a difference between dementia and delirium, according to the books Barclay picked up from the library and the articles he’d printed out and that youtube documentary. Delirium was the symptom, dementia was the syndrome, or something like that. Barclay wasn’t sure about the semantics and all that, just knew that when it came down to it the two looked pretty much the same.

It had been slow going when it first reared up, forgotten errands and misplaced bills, grocery trips where Mama left in the early afternoon and came back hours later, groceries forgotten. She’d had forgetful tendencies before, of course. She was an artist, and she was someone with a hell of a lot on her mind at any given time. 

But this was different. This was new. Barclay, taking a page out of Thacker’s book, started to take notes. 

Next it was the day of the week, the month they were in. Pieces of conversations on repeat. The name of someone from a memory, gone. That person, that entire memory,  _ gone _ . 

And Barclay wasn’t a young man, but he still aged at about a third of the speed of a human. He’d slowed down a bit, but he couldn’t feel it catching up to him yet, couldn’t feel his age in his bones or see it on his face. 

He saw it on Mama’s. 

It got bad, fast, after that. He hadn’t really realized before then just how old she was getting to be. Still, the books said seventy was on the younger end for dementia, but those with hard lives or enough trauma were prone to it earlier, and wasn’t that just their luck, huh? 

She walked with a cane almost exclusively, but lately he wasn’t letting her wander very far at all unless he was right there next to her. She couldn’t see as well, it seemed. She stumbled a lot. 

Sometimes she screamed at him, frustrated at him doing things she couldn’t understand or couldn’t remembered. She’d move papers and forget, blame him. She’d misplace medications and books and grow frustrated. She’d confiscate sharp carving tools from her hands on bad, shaky days, to keep her from hurting herself. But in her mind she was thirty years old, still an artist, still creating. In her mind her hands didn’t shake, and when he took her tools, she raged at him. Stubborn old thing, she’d rather cut off all her fingers than admit he was right, on those days. 

Sometimes she didn’t recognize him, and sometimes that was fine. Sometimes he’d walk in and she’d frown in his direction, watch him with the careful gaze that meant she didn’t know who he was or what he was doing there, but she didn’t so much mind it quite yet. Sometimes it’d set her off. 

“Who are you!? What are you doing here!? I don’t know who let ya’ll in, but you’d better get outta my house right now, ya hear me!” 

The doctors said this was normal, said that the only thing they could do was medicate to control the symptoms and try to keep their patience. “Keep your head up,” he said, but he didn’t have to live through this. Barclay didn’t think he knew a damn thing about what Barclay was going through. 

Sometimes she remembered she loved him. She held his hand and she asked him questions about things, about the kids, about Sylvain, about Pine Guard members they hadn’t seen since they were  _ both _ still young. Those moments were worst when it came down to it, because it was easy if Barclay didn’t think about what he lost, didn’t think about who she’d been before. It was when she came back that he remembered, and that seemed to make it worse. 

He figured that was a rather ungrateful way to feel about the whole thing. 

But he couldn’t control how he felt about these things, just the way he responded. So he did what he’d always done, and he took care. He kept calm and kept his thoughts to the back of his mind, and he made sure she was safe as he could manage. He kept a close eye on things. He thought of Aubrey, and Thacker, and Dani, and Mark, and about how they’d gotten better and come back, even when it seemed like they weren’t going to. 

He thought about Mama, and how she wasn’t going to come back, but how kindly she’d treated him when he was the one on the fritz. He held her hand, and he kept an eye on her, and tried to be subtle about his worry. 


End file.
